Does Jordan Need to Be No. 1?

By

Jason Gay

Feb. 18, 2013 8:14 p.m. ET

Michael Jordan turned 50 over NBA All-Star weekend, and because it's a significant milestone—like 16, 21 and 125, the big five-oh is a birthday you can celebrate publicly without your friends rolling their eyes and grumbling about splitting the check—the basketball kingdom made a big whoop about it. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird may have launched the modern NBA, but Jordan weaponized it into something sleek and commercial, becoming an industry himself, not just a superstar, but the blueprint for an Athlete as Cultural Vehicle. Jordan's talent was so vivid and fastidiously packaged it appears to have vacuum-sealed him in his superstar prime, and even though he had a wobbly denouement as a disenchanted Wizard and remains underwhelming as an NBA executive and owner, it doesn't matter. He is 50 and frozen in bright-red greatness. He's Michael Jordan, and another half century from now, he's going to take off at the foul line, put on some Nikes and Hanes, drink a bottle of Gatorade and dunk on your head. He remains the vision.

ENLARGE

Michael Jordan in 1997, his final season with the Chicago Bulls. He turned 50 on Sunday.
Associated Press

In this recent Jordan re-appreciation, sports fans did what sports fans do, which was argue about where Jordan ranks among the all-time best, and in a lot of those conversations Michael Jordan was fixed at No. 1, ahead of legendary names like Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell and Magic and Larry. This is not a high crime. It's understandable that Jordan would get a nudge to the top on his big weekend; of the NBA icons, he's the freshest memory, so squarely in the generational wheelhouse of the viewing public he may as well be an old college roommate. He may also be, indeed, the best ever. Jordan is not our most socially significant athlete, not while Muhammad Ali can still knock on your door with Billie Jean King, but this does not diminish his essential place. Jordan was a breathtakingly good and ruthless basketball player, without peer or weakness in his prime, in possession of the statistics and championship rings to make his case. He was a one-off, mesmerizing to watch, and you don't need a number in front of his name to appreciate him.

But why the persistent need to rank? Sports has always maintained a good-natured culture of comparison—Ali vs. Marciano; Mantle vs. Mays; Van Gundy vs. Van Gundy—but lately there's been a push to grade every athlete and accomplishment in accelerated real time. All contemporary greats must be measured against classic greats, regardless of age or length of accomplishment; confetti cannot flutter to the floor before a title team is asked if it's a dynasty in the making. Congratulations Super Bowl MVP Joe Flacco—are you the next Tom Brady or what is your deal, man? It gets exhausting. Could you imagine measuring ordinary life in such a manner? Today's onion bagel: Where does it rank on the list of all-time onion bagels? Let's break it down on Bagel-Reference.com.

Part of what drives the mania, of course, is the culture of List-ification which has become so comically pervasive—ranking the 20 Greatest Players is a cousin to 15 Sedentary Weight Loss Secrets, 81 Restaurants To Eat At Before You Perish of Botulism, 10 Cats That Look Exactly Like Daniel Craig. To be clear: I don't think this is a crisis. I like goofy lists and I suppose you like them too. (I've written plenty of them—like the Top 10 Sports Moments of the Year, which just leads to getting yelled at by fans of SEC football.) But the truth is that it's easier to come up with 10 Cats That Look Exactly Like Daniel Craig than it is to persuasively rank the greatest athletes of a single sport.

And yet we're obsessed with attempting to sort it all out, as if it can be conclusively answered. We want to know if Rod Laver would beat Roger Federer; if Sandy Koufax had better stuff than Cliff Lee; if Jim Brown could shred the Ravens defense. And despite eyewitness accounts and ample stats and performance metrics, the answer is always: We don't know the answer. Timing and context is everything in sports, and changes to the game and rules and technology often render comparisons moot (how you compare between eras in a sport like tennis, for example, where players once used wooden spatulas compared with the carbon-fiber lightsabers they use now, is beyond me.) After a while, it becomes clear that these "greatest ever" debates are more about the provocations than the resolutions. These are not fact-finding missions. It's dogs chasing bumpers.

Look, I agree: It's fun to kick back over All-Star weekend and wonder how an icon like Jordan compares to the current game's premier player, LeBron James. Best then versus best now? Who's better? Count the rings! Consider the teammates! (Jordan himself goosed the debate in a sublime and humanizing profile by ESPN writer Wright Thompson, in which he noted, savant-like, that James had limited range moving to his left side.) While entertaining, the question is totally open-ended—LeBron James is only 28, the age Jordan won his first title in Chicago. Any real verdict feels premature and unfair. What's certain is that 22 years from now, James will turn 50 and there will be a fledgling NBA superstar he will be compared with. Maybe that player is as good as LeBron. Maybe not. Does it matter? LeBron is LeBron. Jordan was Jordan. That feels perfect enough.

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